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“Google My Business A to Z” – The Complete Course Pre-Release Announcement

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Learn Google My Business from the Experts

If you follow us here at Horizon Web Marketing you know that our passion is for training business people to untangle the world of digital marketing. We conduct workshops and webinars, we even have our own training channel, the Horizon Web Marketing Academy.

So we’re excited to be putting the final touches on one of our most ambitious projects ever: the Google My Business Complete Course. It’s a deep dive into Google’s primary tool for local business people. But even though it’s a “deep dive,” we never go over your head with our training. Lead SEO trainer Ross Barefoot puts everything into plain business English.

The course is broken down into easily-digested modules and you get a full PDF ebook with the course contents so you can refer back whenever you need. Not only that, we give you lifetime access to the course.

Now we haven’t set a price yet, but we will soon. If you want to be notified as soon as we price and release this complete course, please fill out the form to the right and we will make sure you get all the details promptly.

The full information on the course, including the course contents, is listed below, so read on to see why we’re so excited!

Class Release Notification GMB

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Are you in business? Then “Google My Business” is important to your success.

As a business person, you already know that Google is important. For all of the press coverage Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, and other platforms receive, a Google search is still the most likely way a new customer will find you online.

 

 

image of knowledge panel with indicator for Google My Business

 

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

But most businesses still don’t know how to effectively engage with “Google My Business,” the free management tool that Google has developed to allow businesses to communicate their critical business information to Google. If you’re not familiar with Google My Business (let’s just call it GMB for short), it is a special database that feeds business information into the results that searchers will see about you on Google Maps and in the Google “Knowledge Panel” (see next image).

Drawing of complicated knots to illustrate the complexity of Google My BusinessUnraveling Google My Business is Hard

Although many business owners have explored their GMB account (and more probably have not), very few are not intimidated by it.

First, GMB changes almost weekly, with new features, removed features, changed features. It’s Google’s usual pattern: constant change.

Second, GMB changes from one business to another, so it’s very hard to know how it will appear to any given business, at least when it comes to details of their account.

Finally, it’s not always intuitive. We understand Google does the best they can to make it intuitive and to inform their users, but as with any incredibly powerful software tool, it’s very hard to know what the platform is capable of, and how to access subtle but critical features.

All of this is not to mention the fact that Google has rules and policies surrounding what data you enter and even how you enter it.

Our newly redesigned GMB course is meant to address and remove all of those obstacles for you, the mystified business owner.

We Walk You Through All the Google My Business Features

Our course covers the complete list of GMB features and does it in plain business English with plenty of illustrations and explanations. Just look at the list of modules:

  • Business visibility and Google: what it looks like
  • Factors for good visibility: what will help your listing show
  • A tour of GMB: what’s in the box
  • Typical business action items, overview: here’s your beginning to-do list
  • How to find your business listing: sometimes it’s a treasure hunt
  • Claiming your listing: hey Google, that business belongs to me!
  • Setting up a new business: just getting started? Here’s how!
  • Verifying your listing: prove it’s yours, and not someone else’s
  • Optimizing your business name: keywords, stuffing, and (almost) unwritten rules
  • Determining your business categories: one list to rule them all
  • The importance of how you enter your location: what’s in a (street) name
  • Hours, more hours, and even more hours: And you thought you worked enough hours already!
  • The subtle importance of how you represent your phone number: after all, it’s your lifeline
  • Location links: lots of ways to bring your customers back home
  • Attributes: Google giveth, and Google taketh away
  • Your Business Description: Time to really use those keywords
  • Posts: Microblogging is back in again (take that, Twitter!)
  • Q&A: create your own powerful FAQs, just for GMB
  • Insights and Analytics: who, what, when, how many…understand your audience
  • Reviews: the two edge sword and how to keep it from cutting you
  • Using the GMB Mobile App: sometimes nothing else will get the job done
  • Photos and Videos: leveraging visual assets for a visual age
  • Business-Specific Offerings: Services, Products, Bookings, Menu
  • Tips Multi-Location Businesses
  • GMB Websites: A great tool, but hardly a “website”
  • Users and Access: It takes a team to make GMB succeed; here’s how to manage it
  • Duplicate Listings: Sometimes more is actually less
  • Getting Support from Google: the secrets of the temple
  • Dealing With Spam: the mosquitos of the GMB world

 

promotion image for the Google My Business Free SEO Workshop

New! A Free Google My Business Workshop from the Horizon Web Marketing Academy

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All About Our Google My Business, Free SEO Workshop Training

The Short version

  • Even voice search like Google Assistant or Siri relies on Google Search, so
  • If your business is invisible in Google, it’s invisible
  • Google has every business in its database, somewhere
  • Google My Business is the tool Google has created for you to manage your business in their database
  • Google My Business is often wrong, and you need to manage your business for accuracy and success
  • Our free workshop is coming up and will help you

Already know you want to go? Here are some quick signup links

Sign up here for the Grand Junction evening workshop. Wednesday, November 13th at 7pm.
Sign up here for the Grand Junction Saturday morning workshop. Saturday, November 16th at 10am.

The Full Version

How successful will you be in a local business if no one knows about you, or if they can’t find you?
 
No business can succeed if it can’t connect with potential customers. Gone are the days when that connection came through the local Yellow Pages.
 
People look for local retailers and service providers in a bunch of different ways, but they all seem to be driven by the Internet and, usually, by Google.

Think of voice search. Someone with a clogged drain, or looking for a Japanese restaurant, or searching for the best deal on gardening equipment, are increasingly likely to speak that into their mobile phone.

“Hey Google, what’s a good plumber near me?”
“Siri, where’s the closest restaurant that serves sushi?”
“Alexa, where can I buy cheap gardening equipment?”

If someone is using Siri or Google’s voice assistant, their voice question is turned into a Google search. The Google results are then interpreted by the auditory response the questioner hears. (If they are searching on Alexa or Cortana the search is handled by Bing.)

Logo for Google Voice Assistant

Whether a person is looking for what you have to offer on their computer, by typing into their phone, or even by speaking a question to a digital voice assistant, whether you reach that customer depends on whether Google or Bing know about your business and consider it relevant to what they want.

This brings us to “Google My Business.”

Google’s goal is to index (which is another word for saying “to catalog”) every business on planet earth. They most likely have your business in their index, whether you’ve helped them or not. The management tool for refining the information that Google has about every business is called “Google My Business.”

Using Google My Business, a business owner can manage the information about their business that Google has. This is important because Google gets things wrong about businesses all the time. Wrong address, wrong phone, wrong mapping location, wrong business category, etc.

The only way that you can make sure Google’s information on your business is accurate is by checking it and making changes where you need to. You do that using Google My Business

You may already have done this…or started to! You may already know a bit about Google My Business. But did you know that there are things you can do within Google My Business that will significantly increase your chances of being seen by your ideal customer?

promotion image for the Google My Business Free SEO Workshop

This, in turn, brings us to Optimizing Google My Business, and this free workshop

The world of Google My Business is constantly changing. In fact, it changes so fast that even professionals have a hard time keeping up. For example, in my role as an SEO consultant and trainer, I spend at least an hour every day monitoring changes to Google’s methods and learning new ways of taking advantage of, or protecting my clients from, those changes.

Now you can hire me on an hourly basis, but my time is, frankly, too expensive for most small businesses. This means that most small businesses have to take responsibility for their own “SEO.” If you’re in that boat, you need to know at least enough to make sure you have your ducks in a row so that you don’t lose out to competitors.

We’ve designed the business training at the Horizon Web Marketing Academy to help people just like you succeed in doing the basics of SEO yourself — even with limited time, and limited technical knowledge — without hiring a high-priced SEO agency. In some cases, our “low cost” training is even free.

This is one of those free opportunities that really has value

The workshop we’ve designed, and that I’m blogging about right now, is not some 2-hour sales pitch. In fact, if you look at the training videos I’ve posted on Horizon’s YouTube channel, you can see that they are not heavily focused on sales (probably not focused enough on sales, between you and me).

This workshop will show you the key steps in engaging with Google My Business and optimizing your own business listing for success.

When you are done you will have the knowledge and confidence to make sure you have done right by your business and set yourself up for the visibility you deserve when people look — however they look — for what you have to offer.

Why are we doing a Free SEO Workshop like this?

It’s simple. We believe that the best customers are found when a business is generous. For us, being generous means that we share some of our knowledge and experience without charging you every time we do.

Of course, (to state the obvious) we hope that when you get acquainted with the knowledge and experience that we have to offer, you’ll be interested in our other consulting and training services. Either way, you’ll come out ahead, we promise!

Sign up here for the Grand Junction evening workshop. Wednesday, November 13th at 7pm.
Sign up here for the Grand Junction Saturday morning workshop. Saturday, November 16th at 10am.

picture of keys illustrate adding users

How to Add a User to Google Analytics (and 6 more “add user” how to’s)

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picture of keys illustrate adding users

Adding a user to Google Analytics is easy!

  1. Log in to Google Analytics with your usual login credentials
  2. Click on the “gear” icon or the word “Admin” in the lower left of the screen
  3. At the Account level (the far left column of choices), click on  “User Management”
  4. In the pop-up overlay, click on the blue circle with a white “plus” sign in the top right corner
  5. Enter the email address of the person you want to add (it has to be an email that can log into a Google account, whether or not it’s a gmail account)
  6. Specify the level of privileges you want to assign to the user in the lower part of the screen that appears
  7. Click “Add” (blue button at the top right of the screen)

This is just one of the how to’s that we need to walk new clients through when we start serving their digital marketing program. So, to make it easier to see the instructions that are relevant, we created a playlist of 7 videos that will show you how to add a user to:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Ads
  • Google My Business
  • Google Merchant Center
  • WordPress Dashboard
  • YouTube Channel

If you’ve just started in digital marketing delegation, whether to an agency or employees, you’ll have to share access to critical properties. NEVER pass around your credentials to do that. These videos show you a better way.

(Do you need a video that we haven’t made yet? Tell us in the comments!)

To Our Agency Friends: Feel Free to User these Resources for Your New Clients

Below the embedded playlist below, there’s a link to the playlist itself. These videos are meant to be useful to our clients, but if they add value to your operation, we certainly don’t mind you sharing them.

Care to share?

Here’s a shareable link to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9rAOPzj1j1VfqFqbs8Ov7qO7LlVdW1HB

Just need to access a specific “How to Grant Access” video?

Here are some direct links you can use:

Or, copy the code below and you can embed the full playlist on your own website customer service page.


<iframe 
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PL9rAOPzj1j1VfqFqbs8Ov7qO7LlVdW1HB&rel=0" 
width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">
</iframe>

Google Does SEO, and They Claim it’s Important to their Success

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Every few months it seems I read a post somewhere that proclaims that SEO is dead, or a sham, or useless. So it was gratifying to see that one of the organizations that does NOT buy into that assessment of Search Engine Optimization is Google themselves.

Some of what Google had to say about its own SEO is very important for small business owners. Here are the key points you can learn from this revealing Google post…

Read more
picture of children having search engine success

SEO is About More than Ranking High on Google

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SEO stands for “Search Engine” Optimization. It’s Understandable People Get Confused.

Almost every day I delete an email from some “SEO” company, often written in broken English, telling me that they can guarantee a high ranking on Google. In the first place, such claims are always bogus (yes, I said “always” not “almost always”). In the second place, so what?

Ranking high is nice, it’s desirable, it stokes our egos, but ultimately, most business people realize that a high ranking, even a number ranking, can be completely meaningless. Of course once you think only in terms of “Search Engine” optimization, you might miss that the point of having a website probably is probably not achieved by a person searching on Google or Bing and finding your website.

picture of children having search engine success

Hurray! They found you! … Now what?

An SEO company owes it to their clients to focus, not on rankings, but on business success. Even Google drives this point, as mentioned by former Googler Maile Ohye

“A successful SEO also looks to improve the entire searcher experience, from search results to clicking on your website and potentially converting”

Not only does this make business sense, it’s absolutely critical from Google’s perspective. Think about it, Google is like a tour guide. If a tour guide keeps dropping the tourists off at destinations that bore them, that they can’t wait to leave, where they find nothing of interest that they’d like to take home, that tour guide will not get tips and eventually will lose customers.

Google has a vested interest in having people arrive at a website that they’ve “recommended” and say, “wow, this is just what I was searching for!”

When you become a client with Horizon Web Marketing, we view it an essential component of our program to analyze the type of website experience your customers will enjoy (or hate) when they land on your website. We’d like to offer some of the methods we use to understand and improve visitor experience on our clients’ websites.

3 Easy Ways to Understand Searcher Experience on Your Website

  • The best tool is still the easiest. Visit your own site and try to experience it through the eyes of someone who has never been there. This can be hard at first, but the longer and slower you browse, the more you can get a feel for that first-timer.
  • What good are friends if you don’t use them? Actually we’re talking about using them as unofficial testers. For example, if your site is an Ecommerce site, as a friend to buy one of your products (you might want to give them a substantial discount, say, 100%). Here’s the key, watch them do it. This is an occasionally painful, always useful experience.
  • Check your analytics. Google Analytics will show you on a page by page basis how long the average viewer will stay on a page (behavior > all pages > average time on page), how many of them leave without going deeper into your site ( > bounce rate).

Of course there are more sophisticated ways to measure searcher experience, but the priority remains the same, don’t get distracted chasing rankings or be satisfied when you’ve achieve them. As Maile Ohye said, “improve the entire searcher experience.”